Yesterday the Court reversed in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co., upholding personal jurisdiction under consent-by-registration statutes. Importantly, the Court distinguished between two different legal questions. Whether a state can use consent as a basis for personal jurisdiction is reviewed under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But whether it can offer particular inducements to secure that consent, like the right to conduct local business, is reviewed under other doctrines such as dormant commerce. Justice Alito expressed serious skepticism about Pennsylvania's law on the latter point, but he joined the majority of the Court in leaving the issue open (see footnote 3), to be decided (if at all) on remand.
All that seems quite right to me. As I've argued here before, the relevant source of law for personal jurisdiction isn't the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendments, but rules of general and international law. Taking away someone's property under a jurisdictionless judgment is a deprivation without due process, so the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause let federal courts review how a state had applied the general rules.
Under those rules, each state had jurisdiction over its own corporations. It also might have jurisdiction over other corporations allowed to operate within its borders, given that doing so required the state's consent. But once the Court recognized a dormant commerce right for corporations to operate across state borders, consent or no, this theory no longer worked. The doctrine changed to an amorphous notion of "corporate presence," which soon fell apart under its own weight and was replaced by International Shoe. That quieted these sorts of dormant-commerce questions for a long time, until Pennsylvania's law finally pressed the consent issue in Mallory.
